UC San Diego’s efforts to produce innovative and sustainable
solutions to the world’s environmental problems have resulted in a
partnership with the region’s surfing industry to create the world’s
first algae-based, sustainable surfboard.

The surfboard was publicly unveiled and presented Tuesday evening, a
day before Earth Day, to San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer at San Diego
Symphony Hall, where he hosted the premiere of the National Geographic
“World’s Smart Cities: San Diego” documentary. The program, which
features innovations from UC San Diego, is scheduled to air Saturday, April 25 and May 1 on the National Geographic Channel.

“Our hope is that Mayor Faulconer will put this surfboard in his
office so everyone can see how San Diego is a hub not only for
innovation, but also for collaboration at many different levels,” said
Stephen Mayfield, a professor of biology and algae geneticist at UC San
Diego who headed the effort to produce the surfboard. “An algae-based
surfboard perfectly fits with the community and our connection with the
ocean and surfing.”

Mayfield, an avid surfer for the past 45 years, joined Cardiff
professional surfer Rob Machado and Marty Gilchrist of Oceanside-based
Arctic Foam, the largest surfboard blank manufacturer in North America,
to present the board to Mayor Faulconer.

The project began several months ago at UC San Diego when
undergraduate biology students working in Mayfield’s laboratory to
produce biofuels from algae joined a group of undergraduate chemistry
students to solve a basic chemistry problem: how to make the precursor
of the polyurethane foam core of a surfboard from algae oil.
Polyurethane surfboards today are made exclusively from petroleum.

“Most people don’t realize that petroleum is algae oil,” explained
Mayfield. “It’s just fossilized, 300 million to 400 million years old
and buried deep in underground.”

Students from the laboratories of Michael Burkart, a professor of
chemistry and biochemistry, and Robert “Skip” Pomeroy, a chemistry
instructor who helps students recycle waste oil into a biodiesel that
powers some UC San Diego buses, first determined how to chemically
change the oil obtained from laboratory algae into different kinds of
“polyols.” Mixed with a catalyst and silicates in the right proportions,
these polyols expand into a foam-like substance that hardens into the
polyurethane that forms a surfboard’s core.

To obtain additional high-quality algae oil, Mayfield, who directs UC
San Diego’s California Center for Algae Biotechnology, or “Cal-CAB,”
called on Solazyme, Inc. The California-based biotech, which produces
renewable, sustainable oils and ingredients, supplied a gallon of algae
oil to make the world’s first algae-based surfboard blank. After some
clever chemistry at UC San Diego, Arctic Foam successfully produced and
shaped the surfboard core and glassed it with a coat of fiberglass and
renewable resin.

Although the board’s core is made from algae, it is pure white and
indistinguishable from most plain petroleum-based surfboards. That’s
because the oil from algae, like soybean or safflower oils, is clear.
“In the future, we could make the algae surfboards ‘green’ by adding a
little color from the green algae to showcase their sustainability,”
said Mayfield. “But right now we wanted to make it as close as we could
to the real thing.”

UC San Diego undergraduates in the Biodiesel Action Awareness Network
(BAAN) determined how to chemically change the oil obtained from
laboratory algae into different kinds of “polyols” in order to produce
the core of the algae surfboard.

The algae surfboard not only represents the kind of collaboration
that is the hallmark of UC San Diego, but the fusion of biotechnology,
surfing and environmentally conscious thinking that has made the La
Jolla campus and its environs such a desirable place to work and live
for scientists, innovators and those who cherish the coastal
environment.

Mayfield said that, like other surfers, he has long been faced with a
contradiction: His connection to the pristine ocean environment
requires a surfboard made from petroleum.

“As surfers more than any other sport, you are totally connected and
immersed in the ocean environment,” he explained. “And yet your
connection to that environment is through a piece of plastic made from
fossil fuels.”

But now, he explained, surfers can have a way to surf a board that,
at least at its core, comes from a sustainable, renewable source. “In
the future, we’re thinking about 100 percent of the surfboard being made
that way—the fiberglass will come from renewable resources, the resin
on the outside will come from a renewable resource,” Mayfield said.

“This shows that we can still enjoy the ocean, but do so in an environmentally sustainable way,” he added.